Feasibility of HIV-1 RNA Extraction and Viral Load Testing of Bone Marrow Plasma Using the Abbott m2000 Platform and RealTime Quantitative HIV-1 Assay

Current efforts to fi nd a cure for HIV disease require that viral load assays be available to accurately detect and measure viral load in compartments other than peripheral blood. Over the years, HIV viral load assays have been adapted to measure viral presence in cerebral spinal fl uid (CSF), genital secretions and various other compartments. In this study we describe our efforts to quantitatively recover HIV-1 from pooled pediatric bone marrow plasma spiked with known concentrations of HIV-1 virus using the Abbott RealTime HIV-1 assay and the m2000 platform. We focused on nucleic acid extraction, sample dilution, viral copy recovery, linearity and limit of detection.